Jim Six: Chasing the action for a good story

I ran into a cop recently and, even though we’d met before, I had to ask him his first name.

I’ve been off the street long enough now that most of the cops on the street are young men and women I have never met.

This is in stark contrast to the old days, when I knew most of the cops, from the street to the chiefs’ offices, in most of Gloucester County’s 24 towns.

Times were different then. I often rode along with police officers, sometimes just a casual ride-along to see what we could see, more often a sort of structured event: a drug operation, mostly.

I was not what you might call a shrinking violet. When the cops I was with pulled up to a house with a search warrant and a sledge hammer to open the door, one would always say to me, “Stay in the car until the house is secure.”

And as the guy raised the sledge hammer over his shoulder to give the door a whack, I was always so close behind him I’d have to step back to keep from being hit with the hammer. So much for staying in the car. In fact, I was often the second guy through a door.

I did a lot of those ride-alongs. There were some seriously tense moments — one I vividly recall in Monroe Township — but the scariest one of all was the last ride-along I did, with the U.S. Marshals. We were in Camden and they all went rushing into a house at 1 in the morning and I suddenly found myself standing alone on the empty street, with no streetlights that were working. I remember asking myself “What am I doing here?”

But before that, some of those ride-alongs gave me just outstanding stories.

There was the one in Washington Township, where a drug dealer was handcuffed in the bathroom. His phone kept ringing as his house was searched, so one detective kept answering it.

“No, Jack’s in the bathroom,” he’d tell the callers. “What do you want?” The caller would tell the detective what he wanted to buy and the detective would say, “Come on over.”

Several buyers were arrested when they showed up. (Remember, they had to run a gauntlet of oddly parked cars and even police cruisers to get to the house. There really IS a reason it’s called dope.)

Early on, I learned to put rubber bands around my pants’ cuffs to keep cockroaches from running up my pants. I learned to search houses and cars without touching anything — I was a professional pair of eyes, after all. More than once, I found the heroin or the cocaine in plain sight or on a car seat.

I’ve ridden in back seats with confidential informants — even saved one, and myself, from getting beaten up one night in Franklin Township.

In Camden, one night, I was threatened by a drug lord and involved in a high-speed chase and witness to an Uzi battle. (After the threat, my Closest Companion gave me a pair of plastic glasses with a big nose and mustache attached, in case I needed to go back to Camden. Ha ha.)

I knew the glory days of police ride-alongs was ending when cops started putting me in the back seat of two-door cars and drove me nowhere near the action and then physically blocked me from getting out until all the action was over.